Yehuda Halevi's Poems from the Diwan is a rare and wonderful book. Gabriel Levin has selected some 60 poems from Halevi's voluminous works, and transposed them into English poems that manage, in a nimble and endlessly varied free verse, to be at once startlingly fresh and, when the occasion demands, richly ceremonious.

It has been said of Halevi that the Hebrew language was like "soft wax in his hands", and certainly the variety of form, tone and address in Levin's versions, steeped in the English of the "authorised version", seem to bear this out. Those familiar with Levin's poetry will find in these versions the same qualities of immediacy and erudition, in which the personal is always subsumed, but not submerged, by the greater historical, or in Halevi's case, scriptural resonance. With Levin's copious notes in which the richness of Halevi's art of Biblical allusion is made manifest, these versions constitute a veritable education in the art and milieu of medieval Hebrew poetry.

Before his extraordinary late sea-voyage to the Holy Land in 1140, Halevi spent most of his life in Andalusia. To read him aright, we have to imagine ourselves into those urban courts of Granada, Cordoba or Seville, in which, as Levin puts it, "serious study and a broad humanistic approach to learning went hand in hand with a complex aesthetics of leisure". These city-states were run by "chaotically tolerant party kings", precariously holding out against various waves of fundamentalism - and the more or less peacable co-existence of Jews, Muslims and Christians must make them historically exemplary. The Jewish and Arab poets of the time borrowed literary techniques from each other; in particular, the Hebrew shibbut , or scriptural "inlay" that forms the backbone of Halevi's art, was learned from the Arab iqtibas , or art of Koranic allusion. Iqtibas means "the lighting of one flame from another", and it is tempting to extend the technical term into a metaphor for these societies in which a civilised literary jousting was the blessed alternative to murderous confrontation. It is pleasant to conceive of a parlour game in which the final line of an Arab poem could be taken up seamlessly as the opening line of one in Hebrew. At any rate, this was a society in which poets and scholars gave themselves up to the collective humanist endeavour. In the political sense also, Levin's book is timely.

Reading Halevi is to enter a poetic universe in which the Old Testament is the ur-text. As in Arab poetry of the time, utterly dependent on the Koran, this is a world of fixed symbols, and part of what seems so startlingly fresh to us may simply arise from the fact that we are no longer con versant with the "holy tongue". In Halevi's time, the more conservative thinkers even questioned the use of the scriptures for poetic ends - a polemic that exercises Islamic poets to this day. The Pauline admonition to the Romans could stand as a poetics for Halevi: "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. . ." As Levin points out, the added richness in Halevi springs from the sustained ambiguity as to the secular or sacred identity of the beloved; the classic text here is of course the Song of Songs. Halevi's conventional "fawn" or "doe", which recurs frequently, sometimes takes on more explicitly sacred lineaments, but retains an erotic force:

Such a stunning fawn with a lion's roar

never was nor will there ever be.

He thunders and preys like a young lion and yet

kissing his prey's mouth life restores.

Coleridge observed of Hebrew poetry how "each thing has a life of its own, and yet they are all one life", and it is the seamless passage from the visible to the invisible, from the natural object to its spiritual meaning that is the great gift conferred on the poet by a coherent religious sym bolism. It is in the dazzling metaphoric shift thus afforded, taken as it were in mid-flight, that Halevi (and Levin) most excel. Take the matchless ending to "Distant Dove", written as a penitential selilah to be read for 40 days before Yom Kippur:

Look how she opens wide her bill to admit the spring shower of your salvation; believing with all her might, never losing heart - whether honored or bowed down to dust. (...)

Or this, cast off effortlessly and on the wing, in "Admonitions":

Rid yourself of Time, as birds shake off last night's dew from their feathers. Soar, dart, weave like a swallow, unconfined, free of your masquerades; free of the daily surge of events that crest like the sea. Pursue your King. - Come, enter the fellowship of souls flocking to the Lord's bounty.

Two petitionary devotional poems, "Bear Arms Against the Victim" and "The Penitent", seem to foreshadow the Donne of the "Holy Sonnets", or the Spanish Baroque, in their erotic address and taste for paradox:

Bear arms against the victim of your desire and kindle love with the flame of wandering, since you despise me, aim your lance, and as I loathe myself -pierce me through.

Judging from his selection, Levin seems to favour what one might call the ambiguous Halevi, or the tarrying Halevi, the poet who turns aside temporarily from the business of praising God and lamenting Zion, bewitched by the beauties of this world; he searches out the courtier and the pleasure-lover, much as Pound reinvented the ironist in Propertius. However, his fine translation of the great formal dirge "Zion, Won't You Ask", which was sung in the synagogue in services commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples, partly redresses the balance, though one suspects a great deal more of Halevi is straightforwardly religious in this way. Certainly his hunger for Zion was such - "my heart is in the east and I am at the far end of the west" - that in relative old age he set sail for the Holy Land, leaving Spain for ever. The sequence he wrote during the voyage, translated here as "On the Sea", is probably the tour de force of the book, and contains some of the most audacious translation. The boat on the sea is also the ark on the storms of history, struggling towards Zion. Here is a piece of high drama, which reads as though it were actually written on the reeling deck:

Faint-hearted, knees buckling, God, I gasp, and break into a sweat. Oarsmen gape at the deep, the helmsman lurches, his hands flail, while I - how could it be otherwise? - groping for the rail, dangle between sea and sky. I reel and stagger. Trifles, if only I might dance within your walls, Jerusalem.

The economy of that volta at the end is brilliant, and typical of Levin at his most dextrous. Halevi survived this and other storms before his ship put in at Alexandria, where he tarried for nine months of gracious living, before undertaking the onward journey to his final destination. Whether he ever got there, or recited his "Zion, Won't You Ask" at the gates of Jerusalem, will never be known.